Sex, drugs and the joy of the elasticated waistband

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Elizabeth Taylor owned up to having had a chin tuck, described sex as F-U-U-N and said that she "had a ball being bad"Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Ginny Dougary

Published at 12:01AM, March 26 2011

In 1999 The Times was granted a rare audience with Elizabeth Taylor, who died this week. Here we republish her revealing interview

There she is in the doorway, a tiny figure in black, that famous face with the
dark eyebrows, framed by its halo of spun white hair, white pooch at her
heels, smiling and walking towards us. “Hello,” she breathes, “I’m
Elizabeth.”

She is a beguiling mixture of kittenish femininity and bar-room broad, with
her salty language and a thrillingly vulgar laugh.

She is flirtatious, conspiratorial, funny, down-to-earth with occasional,
slightly worrying lapses into La-La land — when she closes her eyes or looks
up to the heavens, circles the air with her hands, and talks in a frankly
batty way about